Michael J. C. Taylor was my third doctoral student. He secured a
tenure-track position at Dickinson State University, Dickinson,
North Dakota. His dissertation was on the constitutional philos-
ophy of state rights. For his second book-length project, he chose
to work on a biography of Zeppo Marx. We were commissioned
to do this piece on Beauregard by Jon Wakelyn for a 1998 book of
essays he and Charles F. Ritter coedited and dedicated to the
memory and work of Thomas Lawrence Connelly. We do not
claim to have rendered a completely fresh depiction of the
Creole's life, but rather to have done our best to synthesize
extant scholarship.

The popular historian Clifford Dowdey, in his 1955 book The LandThey Fought For, characterized P. G. T. Beauregard as “the Confederacy's first hero.” T. Harry Williams began his biography of the
same year by declaring his subject was “the most colorful of all the
Confederate generals.”1Indeed, Beauregard was involved in every
phase of the conduct of the war, and proved himself a competent
commander at a crucial time when the South's command base was
diminishing. Though he had defended an agrarian Old South, when
defeat came he adapted to realities and, in the process, helped to industrialize a New South.

This essay first appeared in Leaders of the American Civil War: A Biographicaland Historiographical Dictionary, ed. Charles F. Ritter and Jon L. Wakelyn (West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998).

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